Part Five: Entertainment

By Jack Kibble-White and Steve Williams

First published September 2007

Saturday has always been the glitziest night of the week for television, so much so that the sixth day and light entertainment are seen by many to go hand-in-hand. Indeed, when asked by these writers to name his favourite Saturday night programme, Lionel Blair responded, “Sunday Night at the London Palladium“.

Indeed, in the early days of television it was Sunday, and Val Parnell’s variety spectacular in particular, that was home to the top light entertainment turns on British television, in part due to the fact that most entertainers were working the theatres six days a week and hence were only available on Sundays.

Entertainment is perhaps the toughest genre to define on television. Every Saturday night programme has been produced with the intention to entertain (well, apart from Sin on Saturday, perhaps), but most of them have specialised in comedy, quizzing or another factor. Even the titans of light entertainment – most obviously Bruce Forsyth – have ended up specialising in one particular genre. The BBC’s variety department, meanwhile, closed down in the early 1990s, with the idea seemingly being the modern audience had specific tastes and didn’t want to sit through endless hoofing in the hope a comedian might show up later.

This was certainly not the case when the modern era of telly competition began in the mid-’50s. Back then, celebrities were very much all-round entertainers, with comedians expected to sing, dance or play musical instruments to provide variety for audiences – and in the hope that if they didn’t like one part of their act, they might go for another bit instead.

However this multi-tasking was not necessarily to the act’s benefit on television. Before ITV began, the BBC’s light entertainment programmes were entirely producer-led, with the various turns basically doing what they were told. ITV brought with it the instantly recognisable but indefinable “smell” of variety, with the likes of Lew Grade pulling the strings backstage. However in the new era, producers were handed “package shows”, meaning they lost their freedom while star artistes and managers dictated content. Val Parnell and Bernard Delfont had most of the major acts of the day safely under lock and key and were therefore able to dictate to the TV companies who they used. Indeed, for a period, all of Associated-Rediffusion’s light entertainment output was outsourced to the agent Jack Hylton to fill as he saw fit.

What mattered was that they could bring major names to the screen. There’s a famous story that Lew Grade was responsible for vetoing a major sporting contract in the 1960s that would have ensured major events and the top names appear on ITV. The problem was the body behind this contract was the Amateur Athletics Association, and Grade would not have amateurs on any channel he was running.

However it got to the screens, though, it’s accepted ITV used light entertainment as its primary weapon for attracting viewers in its early days. In fact, the ITA noted that during December 1955 and January 1956, “there was a reduction of the order of one third in the total amount of transmission time given over to the news, news magazines, serious discussion, classical entertainment and other ‘balancing’ programmes”, in favour of relentless variety. It certainly pulled in the audiences, though, with two thirds of viewers defecting to the commercial channel.

It’s not that the BBC were slacking in this regard, though – in 1955 upwards of 400 light entertainment programmes were made. The names emphasise how the audience were assumed to be spellbound by showbiz glamour – the most popular shows including Variety Parade, Music Hall, Café Continental and the wonderfully-titled Vic Oliver’s This is Showbusiness.

The Corporation also attempted to compete with the young upstart by emphasising the Britishness of its entertainment output, in the ’50s marketing its array of talent as “the BBC family”, the members including Billy Cotton, Jimmy Edwards, Vera Lynn, Charlie Drake, Eamonn Andrews and Gilbert Harding (clearly the grandad). Indeed, despite the pledge “to entertain” coming third in the BBC’s list of priorities – after the informing and the educating – they weren’t slow to realise the value of popular entertainers; Bob Monkhouse was the first comedian the BBC signed on a full-time exclusive contract.

1960s and 1970s

As we entered the 1960s, the old-fashioned variety bill was becoming somewhat outdated, with producers considering it an unsophisticated use of television. Instead, series were produced with the camera in mind rather than it simply working as an eavesdropper. In addition, the first stars were coming through who owed their success purely to what they had achieved on screen rather than transferring previous stage success to television.

As such, the genre of light entertainment expanded into a number of different sub-genres. Music played an important part in Saturday night television, dating back to 1957 when Six Five Special was invented by the BBC – purely to fill a gap after the restrictions on broadcasting were lifted and they were no longer obliged to close down for an hour in the early evening. The embryonic pop show was a huge hit, even though original producer Jack Good, soon legged it to ITV and the rather more fashionable Oh Boy!, after falling out with the Beeb who forced him to intersperse the pure pop with the likes of jazz and skiffle.

Later, Juke Box Jury was the highlight of many a Saturday night, while ITV countered with Thank Your Lucky Stars. A trend was also begun with some of the more presentable stars of the early ’60 pop boom awarded their own shows. In fact, until the mid-’70s, the likes of Cilla Black, Lulu, Dusty Springfield and Sandie Shaw were all given programmes where they would sing songs made famous by both themselves and other performers, and welcome guest artists from both music and other branches of showbiz. This provided the BBC – who produced the lion’s share – with some much-needed credibility while ensuring there was enough familiarity in the format not to alienate the older generation.

Pop played an important part on ITV, too, most obviously in the productions of ATV. Lew Grade always had one eye on the international market through his ITC subsidiary and many shows were produced at their Elstree studios expressly for export. Tom Jones helped to establish himself as an international superstar with his hip-shaking on ATV, while Lew Grade’s bulging contacts book ensured a huge number of international artists were paraded in front of viewers, including – for a slightly more mature audience – Julie Andrews, Barbara Streisand, Sammy Davis Jr and Perry Como. British audiences didn’t seem to mind that, despite being recorded in downtown Hertfordshire, they were getting these shows second-hand after the Americans had finished with them, and in boring black and white while the US paymasters enjoyed them in sparkling colour.

Eventually pop became less important for Saturday night audiences. The number of singing stars who had the talent – or indeed the inclination – to entertain TV viewers were dwindling, and when music appeared now it was normally provided by The Black and White Minstrel Show or The Val Doonican Music Show. If a chart act did want exposure, it would have to do so in between the comedy sketches on the likes of The Basil Brush Show or The Little and Large Show. It wasn’t until the new decade that pop music returned to playing a major part on Saturdays, and only then when it was used as the basis for a people show such as Popstars or The X Factor.

At around the same time the music programme was falling out of favour, the chat show was becoming an important part of Saturday nights. Unlike the US, where talk shows had been a daily late-night staple since the 1950s, chat shows on British telly were almost always a once-a-week affair.

Parkinson began as a six-week filler in the summer of 1971 and remained a staple of BBC1′s Saturday night for 11 years. It soon became obvious a successful talk show was something of a Holy Grail for the broadcasters, putting enormous stars on screen every week. The chance of Fred Astaire agreeing to host a Saturday night show on BBC1 were minimal, and the potential cost of such a production prohibitive, but on a talk show he could prove to be just as entertaining, and all you had to pay for was two chairs. Of course, in the 1970s most of the major Hollywood stars were still around, so it’s not surprising this is considered a golden age of TV chat.

The Saturday night talk show was almost always scheduled late in the evening – this seemed to be the ideal time to produce the sort of sophisticated conversation viewers were expected to be enjoying at home. If you couldn’t make it to a dinner party that week, Parky and his guests would provide enlightened debate instead. This was also the thinking behind LWT’s late ’70s effort Saturday Night People, which attempted to represent “a gossip column on TV”, with hosts Janet Street-Porter, Clive James and Russell Harty nattering to and about famous faces.

1980s and 1990s

Thanks to Parkinson, the post-football slot established itself as home for the chat show. In 1981, LWT bought the rights to Johnny Carson’s legendary Tonight Show from NBC and ran it opposite Parkinson, but Michael himself knew it was doomed to failure – the American references and some of the guests were lost on British audiences and it was soon pulled. When Parky left Saturday nights in 1982 to defect to TV-am, the BBC tried to find a suitable replacement, and Wogan proved successful for a time, but Terry himself soon moved to a regular weekday slot.

As television executives tended to spend most of their Saturday nights at dinner parties, some experiments were carried out in replicating their ethos. Indeed, Sean Hardie, editor of 1982′s notorious Sin on Saturday, later referred to it as “dinner party television” – the kind of idea you come up with around the table and think is wonderful only for it to fall flat on its face on screen, presumably as copious amounts of booze are no longer involved to get the conversation flowing.

Yet an even more disastrous attempt was made two years later, with Saturday Night Affairs featuring a celebrity (of the calibre of Victor Spinetti and Dave Lee Travis) “throwing a party” at BBC Pebble Mill for their friends, while the camera roamed around and allowed us to eavesdrop on the conversations. This was abandoned after just two programmes due to its shambolic nature and air of complete self-indulgence.

ITV, too, made use of the chat show as a Saturday night banker, and indeed there were times in the mid-’80s when there seemed to be a chat show every week of the year, including Aspel and Company, Mike’s comeback Parkinson One to One and The Late Clive James. Yet an era was ending, with the bell finally tolling after Sue Lawley’s Saturday Matters flopped on BBC1 in 1989. The series was written off as just plain dull, and Lawley later conceded she didn’t have the light entertainment credentials to host a Saturday night show where viewers want a bit of glamour and excitement.

Indeed, the 1990s were barren years for the chat show on Saturday. BBC1′s only serious attempt was Danny Baker After All, which aimed to ape the slick American formats of David Letterman and Jay Leno. However its near-midnight transmission time and Baker’s rather overwhelming personality ensured it enjoyed loyal but resolutely tiny audiences. Yet this was certainly more fun than The Gaby Roslin Show, which Roslin and Channel 4 claimed would bring back the good honest talk show pioneered by Parkinson. However Roslin had the same LE credentials as Sue Lawley, and dreary interrogations of the likes of Lee Hurst and Laura Dern were hardly likely to empty the pubs on a Saturday night.

It wasn’t until 2000 that the chat show became an accepted part of Saturday evenings again, thanks to the return of Parkinson on the BBC. Despite the standard of guest being slightly lower than that of its heyday, it proved that seeing major names talk about their lives can often have rather more fascination than those names actually doing their act. The screaming headlines that greeted Parkinson’s defection to 2004 emphasised the continual value of the talk show.

2000s

It’s remarkable to think that The Black and White Minstrel Show was still being broadcast as late as 1978, but this certainly wasn’t the last of the old-school variety series. As recently as 1988, summer Saturday evenings saw the BBC and ITV go head-to-head with Michael Barrymore’s Saturday Night Out and Summertime Special – two series that, in terms of their production and presentation were no different to the likes of the Palladium and Saturday Spectacular of three decades earlier. Yet it would be hard to suggest Shane Richie or Joe Pasquale would go down in the annals next to Max Wall or Norman Wisdom.

If you want a full stop for the days of variety on TV, you could cite 1988, when LWT decided not to renew the contracts of Jimmy Tarbuck and Cannon and Ball, while a few years later the BBC showed Little and Large and Les Dawson the door. It was felt these acts had run their course and the genre as a whole was on its last legs. Why waste money on expensive sets, choreographers, musicians and costumes when all you needed were four high stools and four wannabes for an episode of Blind Date, which the audience found just as amusing?

Some attempts were made to reinvent the genre for the 1990s, with the BBC sanctioning a TV adaptation of Bobby Davro’s Rock With Laughter touring stage show in 1993. The first episode was dedicated to replicating the glamour and excitement of Saturday nights, so it’s unfortunate that, after BBC1 had changed their minds about screening it at least twice, Davro found himself doing this on a Tuesday.

There have been other attempts since at bringing unashamed light entertainment back to our screens. Indeed, you wait years for a variety show and then three come at once, as in 2000, BBC1 broadcast Jim Davidson Presents, ITV had Bruce Forsyth’s Tonight at the London Palladium and Channel 5 ran The Big Stage with Bradley Walsh, all within weeks of each other. However the talent pool had clearly run dry and neither found themselves returning the following year.

Yet variety might not be dead, and is making a return to our screens by stealth. During the 2005 final of Strictly Come Dancing, Bruce Forsyth was joined by an array of dancing girls and accompanied by a live orchestra to croon and hoof his way through Let’s Face the Music and Dance – an act he could have done on the Palladium stage 40 years previously. 12 million viewers were watching, and it put the top hat on one of the BBC’s biggest entertainment hits for many years. It seems you can’t keep a song-and-dance man down for long.

<Part Four